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Home , Mary Somerville

The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Women and the Stars

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell PRSE; Professor Monica Grady; Dr Claire Brock; and Dr Mhairi Stewart

Saturday 13 June 2015, Berwickshire High School, Duns

Report by Kate Kennedy

Great Discoveries Quietly Made Dr Mhairi Stewart,

This talk told the stories of some of the renowned Scottish female , the discoveries they made and the difficulties they faced; showing how they changed the world and how the world has changed for .

The century from 1850 to 1950, coinciding with the rise of the Women’s Rights movements, was a period of dramatic societal change for women in . By 1889, the introduction of the Universities Act Scotland meant women could graduate from Scottish universities on an equal footing to men. Indeed, the first female graduates received their degrees in 1893, only a year after being admitted to university. Many women had already completed their studies, but had only legally been allowed to graduate at this point. It is historically reported that the first women to graduate in Medicine, from the University of Glasgow, was Marion Gilchrist in 1894. However, this honour actually belongs to ‘James’ Barry, born Margaret Bulkley, a niece of the famous artist James Barry. Dr Barry lived her entire life as a man, in order to study and practice medicine worldwide, and her true gender was not revealed until 150 years after her death. She was the first army surgeon to perform a successful Caesarean section, defined as one where both mother and child survived.

Whilst there are many excellent examples and stories relating to Scottish women in science, for this talk, Dr Stewart focused on six women involved in science during these changing times. Williamina Fleming, a Scottish astronomer born in Dundee in 1857, is especially noted for her discovery of the Horsehead Nebula, a huge interstellar dust cloud in the constellation of Orion. Fleming left school aged fourteen, subsequently becoming a pupil teacher. Deserted by her accountant husband in the United States, she became a maid in the household of Professor Edward Pickering. Pickering famously declared that his maid could do a better job than his male assistants at Harvard Observatory and hired her as a clerical assistant. During this employment, Fleming devised and implemented a system of cataloguing stars according to how much hydrogen could be observed in their spectra. During her lifetime she catalogued over 10,000 stars and discovered the Horsehead Nebula and hundreds of other stars.

Bessie Bowhill and Elizabeth Bertram were nurses from the . Bessie trained as a nurse at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and in 1900 enlisted in the Boer War, whereupon she was stationed in South Africa, returning to Scotland following the War. At the outbreak of World War One, Bessie and Elizabeth volunteered to work with Dr ’ Scottish Women’s Hospital (SWH) and were posted to Serbia. Inglis, a doctor and suffragist, had founded the SWH through her own funds and those of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and was intent on changing women’s place in society by providing female-staffed relief hospitals for the Allied war effort; showing that women could do such jobs. On approaching

1 the Royal Army Medical Corps with her offer, Inglis was told to “go home and sit still”. Needless to say, she did not take this advice. Indeed, the French, Belgian and Serbian governments accepted her offer and she established several units, including one in Serbia. During their time in Serbia, Inglis, Bowhill and Bertram were faced with a raging Typhus epidemic that killed thousands, and advancing forces necessitated regularly moving their entire field hospital and extremely harsh living conditions. Their work and ordeals during the First World War doubtless inspired subsequent generations of women and, indeed, was reported locally in the Borders, in their own words, upon their return.

Isabella Gordon, born in Keith in 1901, studied marine biology at Aberdeen University, and later became an expert specialising in crabs and sea spiders. Whilst she was working at Yale University, William Calman, Keeper of Zoology at London’s Natural History Museum, offered her a position of Assistant Keeper with responsibility for Crustacea. Thus, Isabella Gordon returned to the UK and became the first female permanent member of staff at the Museum. During her time at the Museum, Gordon published and reviewed many articles and books. In 1961, she was invited to Japan to meet Emperor Hirohito, himself a keen marine biologist, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Gordon was known to have a good sense of humour and was a fan of limericks. In 1958, she published a review entitled A thermophilous shrimp from Tunisia, inspiring a colleague to send her a limerick;

A thermophilous shrimp from Tunisia Said: when it gets cold I get busier I dig a hole And fill it with coal And there’s nowhere as warm as it is ‘ere

To which she replied;

The idea’s ok but Aplysia Is the rhyme I should choose for Tunysia A purist and Scot I simply could not Pronounce it to rhyme with ‘it is ‘ier-r-r!!

Dr Marion Gray of Ayr (1902–1979) was a Scottish mathematician known for discovering a graph commonly known as the Gray Graph. The Gray Graph is the smallest possible semi- symmetrical graph achievable with 54 vertices and three edges existing in each vertex. Gray considered this to be a theoretical discovery without practical application and did not publish her findings. However, over three decades later, the Gray Graph has since become crucial to graph theory and network development.

Dorothy Buchanan (1899–1985) hailed from Langholm in Dumfriesshire and became the first female member of the Institute of Civil Engineers, successfully passing the examination in 1927. Indeed, on entering the exam room, Buchanan was dismayed to find another women there, only to be relieved to establish that this was her chaperone rather than a contender for the position of ‘first female’! Buchanan worked as part of the design team for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle and London’s Lambeth Bridge, before marrying and retiring from engineering.

Dr Stewart concluded that, in considering these stories of inspirational Scottish women scientists, it is evident that times have changed dramatically, and in some ways these women certainly paved the way and created a legacy for future generations. However, the story isn’t over; society still has a long way to go, as many talented females continue to leave academia and industry.

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Mary Somerville’s Celestial Mechanics; or How to Reach the Stars Dr Claire Brock, University of Leicester

Mary Somerville (1780–1872) is a complex figure in the history of science. This talk assessed how she attained the position she did, through an exploration of her ambitious childhood programme of study, and how reaching for the stars brought Mary Somerville a unique position in British society.

During an 1882 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, John Tyndall, employing an optical phenomenon commonly known to the Victorians as Pepper’s Ghost, conjured up the image of Mary Somerville between the busts of two indisputable greats of natural philosophy, and Francis Bacon. Dr Brock commented that Tyndall’s choice of projection was provocative. “Firstly, Mary Somerville was a woman. By placing a female, however ghostly, between Newton and Bacon, Tyndall would have done enough to raise the hackles of many who believed women had no place in a line of stellar intellects. Secondly, without any formal education or significant scientific achievement to her name, how could Somerville be considered worthy enough to form a line with two of the outstanding contributors to mankind’s understanding of the world”? Somerville has been described in many ways; as a female populariser of science; a difficult to categorise author; and a brilliant surveyor, interpreter and high-level communicator of contemporary science.

Unusually, Somerville voiced her perceptions of her own place in the scientific community in her Memoirs, concluding that her substance was questionable. “In the climax of my great success, the approbation of some of the first scientific men of the age and of the public in general I was highly gratified, but much less elated than might have been expected, for although I had recorded in a clear point of view some of the most refined and difficult analytical processes and astronomical discoveries, I was conscious that I had never made a discovery myself, that I had no originality. I have perseverance and intelligence but no genius. That spark from heaven is not granted to the sex, we are of the earth, earthy, whether higher powers may be allotted to us in another state of existence, God knows, original genius in science at least is hopeless in this”. Dr Brock described Somerville as “caught between two worlds”. Whilst her work was popular in the mid 19th Century, her writing was too difficult for the general reader and too close to synthesis for the scientific community. The philosopher explained Somerville’s despondency, considering that women lacked originality precisely because they had never been educated sufficiently enough to think “great and luminous new ideas”.

Somerville was born in in 1780. She received little in the way of useful academic education at school and enjoyed the great outdoors, attending parties and keeping up with the latest fashions. However, she also developed an interest in mathematics, often entering problem-solving competitions found in the magazines of the day. Thirsty for more knowledge, Somerville also immersed herself in her father’s books on navigation and read Euclid, which she worked her way through painstakingly with “courage and assiduity”. Somerville’s parents expressed concern about her periods of intense study; her father reportedly commenting “we shall have Mary in a strait jacket one of these days. There was X., who went raving mad about the longitude”! Dr Brock commented that, “Somerville’s father was afraid that excessive study and dedication to her investigations would, in fact, unhinge his young daughter. There was genuine contemporary concern for the mental stability of women who focused their energies on any form of advanced learning, especially in the masculine domains of mathematics or natural philosophy. But it was this early experience of juggling familial and social expectations of female behaviour – performing her allotted tasks, while still ensuring she was able to devote time to her precious study – which would stand Somerville in good stead for the future”. In the 1820s, Somerville became only the second woman to publish a paper in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions,

3 reporting on investigations into sunlight and . Unfortunately, she couldn’t present this paper herself as, at that time, women were not allowed in.

During Somerville’s lifetime, science became ‘fashionable’ amongst polite society. Furthermore, the rise of print culture provided an opportunity for a new genre of literature promoting scientific understanding. For women, a knowledge of mathematics and science was considered to encourage domestic economy and, of the laws of , culinary accuracy. Scientific aspects of the natural world, such as botany and entomology, were also considered appropriate for women as, “something which could be seen and observed, which was not obscure or required difficult or complex calculations…it was encouraged as a way of learning about one’s surroundings which was cheap, because there was readily available material, whether one lived in the town or country, and healthy, as expeditions required some physical exercise”. Dr Brock stated that whilst Somerville enjoyed such pursuits, “her mind was on more stellar objects”. She improved her French and taught herself Latin and Greek; enabling her to read and fully understand ancient and modern works in the original before translating them into an accessible format for all. Indeed, Somerville was a strong believer in education for all, regardless of position in life or background.

Somerville’s first marriage to her cousin ended with his early death. Dr Brock considers that Greig’s lack of understanding about his wife’s scientific passions and a second marriage to another cousin, William Somerville, taught her the importance for a woman who wished to pursue her own interests of a supportive spouse and family. “Mingling in the artistic and burgeoning scientific gatherings of London and continental society gave Mary Somerville the intellectual nourishment for which she craved. She made new friends, amongst whom were some of the most eminent scholars, scientific practitioners and writers of the day”. In 1827, fellow Scot, Henry Brougham had been instrumental in the establishment of the ‘Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge’, with the aim of producing writings for the uneducated masses to educate themselves through the printed word. Brougham commissioned Somerville to translate and explain Laplace’s multi-volume Mécanique Céleste; a work so complex that perhaps only twenty people had read it. Although she agreed to this commission, Somerville doubted that such a complex work could make sense without a reader already being very well versed in high-level mechanics. Indeed, she was correct, as the resulting Mechanism of the Heavens ended up primarily as a Cambridge textbook.

Dr Brock noted that whilst “Somerville’s works might have been popular, in the sense that they were synthesising the ideas of others, popularising the previously inaccessible”, they also sold thousands of copies over multiple editions. To put this into context, Somerville’s Connexion sold more in the decade after publication than Darwin’s far more controversial Origin of Species did in the same period of time. Furthermore, whilst her works were challenging and obscure to the ordinary reader, many tried to tackle the content simply because they were astounded by her achievements and in awe of her intellect. Dr Brock quoted the novelist ’s description of reading the parts of Mechanism of the Heavens that were comprehensible to her. “For my part, I was long in the state of a boa constrictor after a full meal – and I am but just recovering the powers of motion. My mind was so distended by the magnitude, the immensity, of what you put into it! I am afraid that if you had been aware of how ignorant I was you would have felt that you were throwing away much that I could not understand, and that could be better bestowed on scientific friends capable of judging of what they admire. I can only assure you that you have given me a great deal of pleasure; that you have enlarged my conception of the sublimity of the Universe, beyond any ideas I had ever before been able to form. The great simplicity of your manner of writing, I may say of your mind, which appears in your writing, particularly suits the scientific sublime – which would be destroyed by what is commonly called fine writing. You trust sufficiently to the natural interest of your subject, to the importance of the facts,

4 the beauty of the whole, and the adaptation of the means to the ends, in every part of the immense whole”.

Dr Brock considers that Somerville was committed to expanding the female mind, “to allowing other women to experience the joy she found when she was released from ordinary schooling and allowed to pursue her own interests. Like a ‘wild beast released from a cage’, Somerville wanted to charm her readers with an insight into the swirl of ideas which were enveloping scientific communities across Europe”. Somerville’s work, however, also inspired others and led to a momentous discovery by John Couch Adams who, upon reading a sentence in an edition of Connexion of the Physical Sciences from 1842, had been inspired in his attempt to calculate the orbit of . Additionally, in a review of the same text, Cambridge Professor first proposed a familiar term in print that of ‘’, to describe those engaged in all forms of scientific study. For Whewell, Somerville’s work embodied the true scientific enterprise. Dr Brock commented, “and so the title for a profession was born, ironically in a review of the work of a self-taught woman with little practical scientific experience”.

Similarly to John Stuart Mill, some commentators, however, lament Somerville’s career. Richard Anthony Proctor considered that, “while her writings show her power and her thorough mastery of the instruments of mathematical research, they are remarkable less for their actual value, though their value is great, than as indicating what, under happier auspices, she might have accomplished”. Dr Brock concluded by stating that, instead of lamenting what Somerville may have achieved under different circumstances, it is more valuable to consider what she actually achieved. “Laplace remarked, amusingly, that only two women understood his work: Mary Greig and Mary Somerville; to which he later added a third: Mary Fairfax. They were, of course, the same woman. That one woman, in turn, sought to make abstruse concepts accessible to a wider audience, fully believing in the right of those readers to know more. “While her head is among the stars”, noted Maria Edgeworth, “her feet are firm upon the Earth”, and it was this combination of steadiness, focus and insight which proved that women could understand and, indeed, practise science. Mary Somerville may not have produced as much original work as she had desired, but her influence was key to the development of female education in the 19th Century”.

The Rosetta Mission: Landing on a Comet Professor Monica Grady, The Open University

Professor Grady discussed the current discoveries and work being undertaken in Space science, with particular reference to the Rosetta Mission.

Professor Grady commenced by explaining the scientific reasons and questions behind wanting to land on a comet. 4,567 million years ago, when the Earth formed from a cloud of gas and dust, its surface was incandescently hot and was kept hot by the bombardment of other bodies. At this time, the atmosphere mostly comprised steam and, as such, most of the water and carbon on the Earth was lost. Gradually, the Earth cooled and settled down and the bodies that were hitting the Earth continued to do so, but much less frequently. Thus, comets and now started to add water and carbon to the Earth, assisting in the creation of a habitable world. The water on Earth today is a mixture of that which was indigenous to the Earth when it was created and that which was added by comets and asteroids. One of the questions the Rosetta Mission is seeking to answer relates to the composition of this mix of indigenous and exogenous water and, in terms of carbon, what kind of molecules were added to the Earth by comets; were they the building blocks of life on Earth?

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Both asteroids and comets orbit the Sun. They are leftover remnants from when our planetary system was formed. Rather than dividing into two distinct groups of bodies, comets and asteroids should be considered on a continuum. Asteroids are made of dust, rock and metal. They are mainly found between Mars and Jupiter and orbit the Sun. Comets contain dust, rock and ice and were formed much further out in the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto is found. They also orbit the Sun, but can have an inclined orbit. Professor Grady commented that, “in earlier times, asteroids and comets were thought of as if in a zoo, contained in specific ‘cages’ of space; today it is likened more to a ‘safari park’ where, although generally keeping to their own kind, they can mix!”

Previous missions to comets include Halley’s Comet in 1986, when the European Space Agency’s Giotto Mission and the Russian’s spacecraft Vega 1 and 2 discovered, through close-up imagery and spectroscopy that the nucleus of the comet was made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. The images obtained from Giotto of the cometary nucleus confirmed that Halley’s Comet is actually a very dark rather than a very bright object as previously thought; more like a ‘dirty ice-ball’. Some comets, however, such as Hale-Bopp, are bright enough to see in the sky with the naked eye. The next cometary mission, Wild 2, undertaken by NASA in in 2006, resulted in the first ‘stardust’ captured via an extremely light substance called aerogel and returned to Earth for analysis. During the capturing process, many of the volatiles such as ice and gas are lost, leaving just the dust particles and giving a partial picture of the make-up of the stardust.

The most recent mission, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta, studying comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is a long-term project that was launched in 2004. It has taken Rosetta ten years to reach the comet and, in doing so, it orbited the Earth twice and Mars once in order to achieve the momentum required to reach the comet. Professor Grady explained the meaning behind naming the mission, Rosetta. The Rosetta Stone, currently located in the British Museum, is a granite stone inscribed with a decree on behalf of King Ptolemy V, dating from around 196 BC. The decree appears in three scripts; Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Ancient Greek and Demotic script. As it essentially presents the same text in three languages, it provided the key to understanding Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and, as such, the pre-Classical cultures of Egypt, Babylon, etc. Similarly, it is hoped that the Rosetta Mission will pave the way to a further understanding of comets, the Solar System and humanity itself. The Philae Lander, a component of Rosetta, was named for similar reasons; Philae being the island in the Nile that previously housed a huge temple to Isis, in front of which two obelisks were located. These obelisks were key to the decoding of the Rosetta Stone and the Philae Lander will illuminate the results from the Rosetta Mission.

Rosetta arrived close to Churyumov-Gerasimenko in January 2014. In July 2014, ESA received the first close-up pictures of the comet and it was not as expected. Instead of the anticipated smooth, roughly spherical object, the images showed a heavily cratered, non- uniform object. This presented the engineers and scientists with a problem, as, although they knew the comet measured about five kilometres across, they could no longer ascertain the mass of the comet, leading to doubts over whether landing would be at all possible. Furthermore, some potential issues were identified, as images of the comet showed it to be more active than expected, with dust and gas having the potential to obscure the stars that Rosetta uses to navigate. Over time, engineers managed to create a realistically shaped model and, alongside improved images from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), determined a potential landing site for Philae in October 2014. This site was named Agilkia, after the safe- haven island in the Nile River where, following flooding in the early 20th Century, the temple of Philae was relocated, stone by stone, by UNESCO.

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On 14 November 2014 at 10 am CET, the Philae Lander was released from Rosetta. It would take seven hours to arrive on the comet. Professor Grady described the tension of waiting at the Science Operation Centre in Darmstadt for news of whether the mission had been successful. Journalists, not fully understanding the process and exact timescales, were becoming impatient; stirring speeches were being made and meetings held; the tension in the room was unlike anything experienced before. When the signal was received from Philae confirming it had landed, the room erupted with joy and relief. However, Professor Grady commented that the scientists knew straight away that things had not gone exactly to plan. When Philae landed, it bounced several times, settling in a different landing site to that originally planned. However, one minute after it landed, data were received from the Lander. Philae continued to operate for 70 hours, achieving 80% of its goals. Unfortunately, however, because it had landed on its side following the bouncing, the mechanism meant to drill into the comet did not function. Furthermore, due to its final landing site differing from the one planned, Philae’s battery did not receive enough sunlight to continue working and it went into hibernation. Professor Grady stated that it is hoped that, with the movement of the comet around the orbit, it will eventually gain enough power from the sunlight to enable Philae to wake up and start working again.

Addendum: The morning after this lecture, Sunday 14 June 2015, BBC Breaking News reported that the Philae Lander had indeed awoken and was beginning to transmit data once more, following a sleep of c. 7 months. Professor Grady was reportedly delighted.

We are Made of Star Stuff Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell PRSE

This talk considered the in our bodies and asked where have they come from? What was the Earth made from? What have stars and the Big Bang got to do with our bodies?

The Periodic Table tabulates all the stable chemical elements, laid out in order of mass, with the columns containing elements of similar chemical properties. Two thirds of the human body is formed of water – that is hydrogen and oxygen; the other elements that make up the commonest five in the body are iron, calcium and carbon; there are also small amounts of sodium, potassium, lithium, etc.

When we are born we are small, and we grow by taking on more atoms through the water we drink and the food that we eat in the form of animal and plant matter. Similarly, the plants that we and other animals eat start small and grow through incorporating atoms from the soil and air. As such, when we eat plants and animals, we are eating atoms from the soil. But where did these atoms originate?

The Universe started about fourteen billion years ago, from a tiny volume with a rapid expansion, officially named the Big Bang. A fireball of energy was produced which was extremely hot and then expanded and cooled. Einstein’s equation E=MC2 came into effect; meaning that some of the fireball’s radiation energy could become matter or mass. Solid material began to form in the Universe. In the first instance, this was unrecognisable matter, some exotic particles; however, particles combined to make larger particles, thus producing more recognisable forms, such as the nuclei of hydrogen and helium atoms. Within a few minutes of the Big Bang occurring, the (nuclei of the) two lightest elements of the Periodic Table, hydrogen and helium, were created.

After the first three minutes, the expansion and cooling meant that particles were no longer able to meet and combine. Theoretically, the Universe should have been stuck with solely

7 hydrogen and helium forever. This is obviously not the case. Where, therefore, did the other elements originate? Dame Jocelyn explained that all the other elements were created in the stars.

Stars form in the dark parts of the galaxy, such as the Horsehead Nebula. These areas of the galaxy are dark because they are relatively dense and contain particles of dust and molecules of gas. They are dense enough that they block out light from further parts of the Universe; like drawing curtains across a window. The stars form in these dark, dense clouds when particles of gas and dust form together in a random knot. The extra gravity of the knot draws in more particles, causing it to grow bigger over millions of years. As the knot grows, its central temperature rises, and when it reaches c. ten million degrees, nuclear burning, or fusion, starts and the knot begins to shine as a star, due to hydrogen being converted to helium and energy.

The Sun is burning 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second. It does not contain enough hydrogen to last forever, but should continue for another five billion years. No stars live forever; they all ultimately run out of hydrogen and become clogged with helium. Once this happens, they can start to burn helium and it is during this stage that carbon is created. For the majority of stars this is the final stage; the star becomes a white dwarf, gradually cools and becomes invisible. When this happens, the carbon is locked up within the star and is not available. A minority of stars, however, such as Betelgeuse or the Pleiades, which are much heavier than the Sun, have several more stages to their life and last an extra 600 years. These are the type of stars we are dependent upon for life, as they create the nuclei of larger atoms such as neon, oxygen, sodium, magnesium, nickel and iron, producing within them the elements required for life. Eventually, the star explodes; 95% of the star goes out into space and the remaining 5% becomes a pulsar. This explosion ends the sequence and releases the elements required for life into the Universe.

The Sun formed, like other stars, in a dark cloud and was made from material in that cloud, plus material that reached the cloud from (typically) two previous generations of exploding stars; the Sun is a third-generation star. The planets were made from some of the material left over when the Sun formed. So humans contain material forged in the stars and human life is dependent on the birth and death of stars.

The Vote of Thanks was offered by Professor Jan McDonald FRSE.

Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the RSE, nor of its Fellows The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy, is Scottish Charity No. SC000470

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